A talk with Bernhard Bockelbrink, at ALE 2015 in Sofia, Bulgaria. August 26, 12:00-12:30. More Details

Everyone knows the hype: Startups are places of vibrant energy, bursting with motivation and
productivity which are unheard of in the corporate world.
Yet as these organizations grow, more often than not the motivation is lost, and the productivity gradually declines until there is nothing left but a memory of the golden days.
And suddenly it becomes a huge effort maintaining acceptable levels of employee engagement,
innovation, productivity, and happiness. It appears inevitable that growth is accompanied by attempts at installing management and hierarchies, even though this usually demotivates both founders and employees: it erodes what’s left of the organizational culture everyone loved so much when they started out.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could maintain the spirit of a startup, the motivation and the productivity, even with a large organization?

This talk will introduce you to Sociocracy 3.0, a lightweight, free and open-source framework for building agile organizations from networks of semi-autonomous and self-organizing teams, without resorting to traditional ideas of management, hierarchies or lines of reporting. All policies, including strategy, processes and organizational structure are created in teams, and an agile approach towards continuous improvement of policy makes sure the organization organically adapts to a changing environment.

We will begin with a brief overview on some basic patterns for tapping collective intelligence of a team in order to achieve self-organization and continuous improvement: making and evolving decisions, selection for people in roles, and supporting development of individuals in the team towards acquiring new skills and improving their performance.
The main focus of this talk is on coordination and alignment of self-organizing teams in agile organizations. We see how an organization grows from one team to a network of teams, using patterns for organizational structures that allow for effective decisions across multiple teams (e.g. on strategy, product, portfolio and software architecture) and for effective abstraction of shared inhouse services (like administration, operations or HR). We will also discover two different structural paradigms for agile organizations and take a look at multi-stakeholder environments.